No matter the size, the goal of every organization should be a move towards an Intelligent Automation Program. Basic RPA involves automating repetitive, rule based tasks happening at scale in your organization. Intelligent Automation brings in tools such as AI, machine learning, and conversational UX to dramatically expand the available use cases.

Companies embrace intelligent automation work to identify opportunities, scale their capabilities and programs, and develop centers of excellence. To level up your intelligent automation program, you must focus on four key strategies:

1. Gaining an understanding of how new AI automation technologies work
2. Knowing where automation will support your business strategy
3. Properly implementing automation tools and processes maximize efficiency gains and maintain company data security
4. Using the correct automation platforms to transform your business

Let’s break these down one by one:

How New Intelligent Automation Technologies Work

At the core of most intelligent automation programs, there is a robotic process automation (RPA) platform. An Intelligent automation program involves developing or customizing automations to streamline time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitive workflows. Automaton frees human employees to focus on higher-value work for the organization. Examples of business processes ripe for automation include timesheets, expense claims, employee onboarding and offboarding, payroll, employee training, and more. See more examples of our Prebuilt Automation Solutions for Finance and Accounting.

RPA technologies can do more than ever before including integrating AI technologies like, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). With these tools digital workers can understand more data sources and perform more complex tasks.

When adding AI to your existing automation program you might start with an RPA Assessment to make sure your existing code is compatible with these new tools.  Another element to consider is your current infrastructure. At WonderBotz we consider Secure Cloud the critical path to AI Readiness.

How Intelligent Automation Fits with Your Business Strategy

To build and evolve your intelligent automation program, your organization needs to identify new automation opportunities continuously. Automation Discovery can uncover the automation opportunities that are most meaningful to your team, and those that have the highest ROI potential.  These new automations should meet business goals: to eliminate low-value tasks to make room for people to perform high-value work, improve your employees’ work/life balance, and increase customer satisfaction.

Selecting and prioritizing the processes to automate can be done by speaking with your team or leveraging an AI-enabled process discovery tool.  They employ trackers that are capable of capturing  the tasks people are actually doing on their computers and generating related visualization. In comparison, process mining tools may be used to visualize logs generated by systems as they do not directly capture usage information from the desktop.

The employees most involved in contact centers, shared service centers and back-office processes often perform repetitive tasks in their typical workday. If you’re just getting started, these “boots-on-the-ground” would have the best ideas of where the opportunities are for automation and can be incentivized to come up with new ideas for automations.

Managing Multiple Automation Platforms

Leveling up your automation program may mean deploying more than one RPA platform, an approach referred to as a dual platform. Typically, an initial platform was selected based on it being the best fit for the known needs. However, as time has passed, advances and specializations in the platforms may make it easier to automate certain types of business processes on a different platform.

For example, by running dual platforms like Blue Prism and UiPath together, your organization can take better advantage of prebuilt solutions and no-code automations that can be customized to meet your specific workflow requirements. Rather than use a less efficient tool, often the second platform is added to maximize the value available to the organization.

Also, as it is very hard to justify migrating automations to the new platform when your resources could otherwise be adding new valuable automations, the original platform is retained until the automations on it reach end-of-life.

If your company is engaged in a multi-platform RPA strategy to consider consolidating your orchestration with ARIA Cloud. Control all of your digital workers from one cloud based interface and integrate emerging technologies into any workflow. Learn more about how Aria Cloud can simplify multi-platform strategies.

The Right Talent – Augmenting your Automation CoE

For your automation program to succeed and grow, your organization needs the right talent pool for successful implementation and expansion. The people who oversee the transition to an Intelligent Automation Program require a specialized tech skillsets. Emerging technology integrations are often code heavy and require familiarity with NLP, OCR, AI/ML infrastructure.

Members of your current team may have these skills, but if not, it’s essential to recognize that outside help may be needed to fill gaps and help you go faster. Lacking in-house skills for intelligent automation shouldn’t be a reason for holding your organization back from building your automation platforms and achieving digital transformation. WonderBotz is here to help with our WonderBotz Podz Professional RPA Staff Augmentation service. We can lend you one of our MVP’s on a full-time or part time basis to get your Automation CoE humming with new technology capabilities.

Finding the Right Partner in Intelligent Automation

When choosing an Intelligent Automation Program partner look at a firm’s case studies. You want to see proof of the results, amount of experience, and approach to the engagements.

By partnering with WonderBotz, your automation development and implementation are managed by a respected partner with relationships with leading automation and platform companies around the globe. WonderBotz leverages our relationships with Blue Prism, UiPath and Automation Anywhere automation platforms. ARIA integrates with AWS and Azure for cloud infrastructure, and with your existing hardware for On-Prem instillations.  Our expert team are here to help you fully execute your intelligent automation and transformation plans.

For even more speed to value consider our prebuilt solutions, that make it easy to level up your automation program without spending months on bespoke solutions. Our clients span every stage of automation adoption, from automation beginners to veterans. Our assemble-to-order approach also enables us to build better and more valuable automations for our trusted clients.